art of rally

Almost gave up early but glad I didn't.
First starting out, it felt like the controls were wooden and stiff, the cars were unresponsive, and the camera angles were always messing me up. I couldn't control the cars, kept crashing into things, and generally wasn't having any fun.
Having stuck with it a bit longer, I came to realize that the game is closer to a sim than an arcade racer and the physics model is heavily focused on vehicle weight transfer. After that, the rest fell into place.
Hints:
- Control problems? You're probably using too much throttle and not slowing down enough for turns. The physics engine punishes you for constantly flooring it and rewards you for easing into the throttle and using part throttle in a lot of situations.
- The brakes are exceptionally strong on all cars on all surfaces. Use them!
- You don't need to Fujiwara Takumi every single turn.
- Understeering in a slow corner? Lift off the throttle entirely to get the weight back over the front tires.
- The game punishes you for crashing. Even the lightest collision almost always results in a 180 spin. Avoiding offs in the first place is the best strategy.
- Loss of control and pendulum-ing all over the place? The camera lags behind the car's movements, and amplifies the situation. Lifting off the gas prevents the pendulum effect.
- There are no pace notes and sometimes you can't see the hairpin or decreasing radius turn coming up ahead. Discretion is the better part of valor.
- Hate the rainy stages? They're the perfect place to practice your throttle control and tons of fun once you get it down.
Things I like:
- Charming aesthetic
- Nice variation in levels and cars
- Music selection
- Once you get a hang of the physics model and start putting it all together, it becomes super rewarding to chain together an entire stage of perfect corners. Stick with it!
Nitpicks:
- Camera lag / sometimes you can't see what's coming up ahead
- Occasional performance problems / FPS drops
- Cuts are allowed but sometimes the game questionably resets your car when you're only a few feet off the road

Art of Rally is an odd but enjoyable game that does a lot of things right, but also gets a few things wrong. Let’s go over them.
First of all, let's go over how it looks. Personally, I think it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous to look at, doesn’t really matter what car you pick or which track you're driving, it is consistently stunning to look at. In an age where driving games are all about photorealism, this is a breath of fresh air. I know it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but aesthetically I think it’s right up there with some of the most striking games I’ve ever played.
Sonically it’s also very well crafted. The cars sound good, the effects from driving on the various surfaces provide feedback as well as sounding great, but the real star here is the soundtrack. It’s nothing short of phenomenal. It’s perfectly pitched to those real life broadcasts where you’d see Subaru’s and Lancia’s diving over crests and kicking up gravel as they sped past. I’d go as far as saying the soundtrack to this game is immaculate. Even if you don’t buy this game, go check it out on youtube or spotify. It’s fantastic.
Gameplay is mostly good. You have the general options you would have for rally games, as well as a story mode that sees you rally across stages and rallies that gradually get longer and harder with faster and faster cars over the space of when rallying emerged as a sport right up to the mid to late 90’s when Subaru, Toyota and Mitsubishi vying for podiums.
There are several maps of which stages are built from, all of which can be modified so that the races can take place in the rain (or snow), in the fog, at various times of the day and night. It’s what you would expect really.
Surfaces include dirt, gravel, snow, ice and asphalt as well as wet versions of all of these. They all drive as you would expect. A personal preference is that I’m not keen on the tarmac based ones, I have the least fun driving these rallies but I can see why they would be someone's favourite.
One thing I do not like at all is levels that have rain on them. I think they are a tad difficult and could do with toning down. I groan whenever I see them in legs of a rally I need to complete. They are like driving on skid pans with how slick they are on top of having puddles liberally scattered that make them a complete chore to play. These levels should be a bit harder but should be an exercise in seeing how sideways you can keep the car rather than struggling to keep the car on the road.
Another down I’m going to give the game here is that going off the road sees you reset and eat a 5 second time penalty. Rally is about cutting corners wherever you see them and the game feels so inconsistent on where it will nab you for going offroad and will not seem a little harsh. I think if the driver wants to go off road where it looks like they can, they should be able to. If you do not want the driver to cut, prevent them from doing so with obstacles.
Speaking of which, there’s very few obstacles in this game. Roads narrow and widen, but it’s not often you see ditches either side, or have to go through gates or anything like that. There are things like hay bales to slalom through but it would be nice if there was more variation to the scenery.
Talking of the scenery. Some of it is destroyable and some of it will bring you to a dead stop. This also seems very inconsistent. If a car looks like it should smash through it, it should be able to smash through it. Yes orange plastic netting barricade, I’m talking about you.
Also on the track are spectators, which add a well needed bit of texture to driving. It’s very exhilarating to drive through a crowd and watch them narrowly avoid being hit by a 150kph chunk of metal, but there are occasions where they obscure a corner and it can lose you time, especially as this game features no pace notes.
I am sort of bewildered why there’s no mud to drive on, sure you have wet dirt, but it’s not the same. Effects for driving over certain terrains are missing as well. It would be lovely if driving in the dirt of the deserts you kicked up a huge dust cloud behind you. I think this may have been cut to maintain performance? Seems a bit odd it’s missing.
Car selection is great. All your favourites are here and present. You can even mod in decals for them. I am sad that we don’t go any further than the 90’s as there are some classics that came after that era, but it’s really hard to be disappointed at the vehicles that made it into the game, as well as the cleverly named “off brand” names. Same goes for the real life parodies of the drivers from each era you’ll go up against, a lot of love and care was put into a knowing nod to past legends both vehicles and drivers. It’s clear to see a lot of knowledge about this wonderful sport has been captured with a tongue in its cheek.
Finally I want to talk about performance. For some reason this game runs like butter for the first 30 to 60 minutes of you playing it, and then it starts to micro-stutter and get unsustainable to play as it chugs about. I think it has to do with the game loading between rallies or something, but it really shouldn’t be doing this and it can and will hamper your enjoyment, especially in those long play sessions where you start to get into the zone.
Overall I give Art of Rally a thumbs up, it’s a nice game to play while you wait for friends to come online or for a quick 20 minute hit of gameplay, but it doesn’t come without its problems and you should consider those when making a purchase.
I do hope that Art of Rally makes a sequel and squashes a lot of issues I mentioned, because overall I think it could be a fantastic skill based time waster if it ironed a few of its kinks out.

This is one of the most stylistically refined games I've ever had the joy of playing. It's like stepping into the gold-tinted daydream of a kid from the 80's who grew up watching rally stages on TV. All the little details from the satirical sponsors to the parting crowds of spectators just fit in so perfectly, with this wonderful air of nostalgia to the whole thing. The overall aesthetic is incredibly well thought-out, and the result is something that's genuinely beautiful in its simplicity - it doesn't try to be more than it needs to be, and I love it for that.

Gameplay and car handling actually has a lot of depth and weight to it. It's a very nice balance of arcade and realism, but it's also *much* more complex than I expected going into it for the first time, with what feels like actual weight-shift simulation as the cars drift and corner. It's tricky, with a bit of a steep learning curve, but overall immensely satisfying and very manageable with time.

It's not all perfect - Group 4 cars in particular feel very slippery, but once you make it into Group B everything feels twenty times better (and it becomes clear where the dev's heart lies). It runs well but it's not incredibly well optimised, which is strange for a low-poly game, and tends to stutter occasionally if you play for too long.

But the complaints are minor. It's a genuinely beautiful game with a surprising amount of depth and a pleasant complexity to the handling. Plus the soundtrack is fantastic.

Would recommend if:
- you loved 90s fixed perspective arcade racers, or the old Micro Machines games, or RC Pro Am, or really any low-rez fun racer.
- you love rally and the history of it but don't want a simulation of it
- you like the vibe of games like Lonely Mountains: Downhill

I came to this game expecting a purely arcade experience. I knew I misunderstood the assignment the moment I reached my first turn and flew off straight into a tree. Don't be fooled by the cute low poly graphics and the rally cars, this game has some of the most realistic physics in a non-sim game I've ever played. It took me a while to learn, but when I did I became so hooked I basically only played the career mode of this game and nothing else for a week straight.

Strong 8/10, there were some minor performance issues but nothing extraordinary.

If you love Rally games this strikes the perfect balance between Realistic rally driving and arcade. It is the perfect rally game to tune out and decompress for me.
Unfortunately the most recent updates have introduced a mechanic that causes most unstable/peaky vehicles to randomly oversteer, seemingly out of the blue (even on straight sections). Its random nature introduces a really unfun mechanic to the game. (I hope the devs see this and fix it in the future).
Otherwise one of the best rally games I have played.

Rallying that is easy to get into. Don't let the seemingly simple graphics fool you - it has a great physics model and an even better soundtrack.